Posthumous Films

James Gandolfini's Final Movie Is Already Garnering Oscar Buzz - But Is It For Real?

James Gandolfini’s final film The Drop hits theaters this weekend and the Oscar chatter surrounding his performance has already begun.

USA Today writes that “Gandolfini, who died in June 2013, at age 51 from a heart attack, could garner a posthumous Oscar nomination.” They echo sentiments overheard when The Drop premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, an awards-season launchpad where most conversations about a movie aren't “It was this good” but instead “It may win this many Oscars.”

Gandolfini plays the manager of a mob-owned Brooklyn bar in the deceptive, slow-burn thriller. He gets caught up in some bad business that his bartender (Tom Hardy) needs to set straight. Gandolfini delivers a typically fine supporting performance, his New Yawk moxie on full display. However, the Oscar talk surrounding it has little do with the performance and everything to do with his recent passing. Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Matthias Schoenaerts all do strong work in the film, but they’re left out of the conversation because the focus is on Gandolfini’s final frame.

The human urge to pay our respects to an actor often clouds critical evaluation and inflates the value of their posthumous releases. With the recent passings of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams, the posthumous Oscar conversation will definitely continue. Such media-fueled attention rarely adds up to Oscar, however. That only happened twice — when Peter Finch won for his classic work in 1976’s Network, and when Heath Ledger got an Oscar for playing the Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight.

However, I have to believe that if Ledger had been alive, the Oscar would not be his. Apart from technical categories, the Academy never gives gold to comic book movies. Ledger’s Oscar was the Academy’s funeral wreath. Even the audiences behind the polls at the MTV Movie Awards are prone to such behavior, awarding the late Paul Walker and Vin Diesel the “Best Onscreen Duo” award in 2014 over more deserving competition like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.

This funereal hype goes all the way back to James Dean, the first actor to get posthumous Oscar nominations. Dean was famous among teens when he was alive, but infamous when he died in a car crash at the age of 24, before his movies Rebel Without a Cause and Giant were released. Those two films rightly went on to be classics, but you’ve got to wonder whether the world would have paid as much attention had Dean lived.

We might assume that an actor’s death also translates into box office success, much like the skyrocketing disc sales for Nirvana (after Kurt Cobain committed suicide) and 2Pac. That’s a difficult thing to measure, though, since every film draws its own audience. The Dark Knight broke records, but the movie had a whole lot more going for it besides the passing of its star.

On the other hand, James Gandolfini’s first posthumous film, Enough Said, made over $17 million versus the $610,000 Not Fade Away made while he was alive. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s latest A Most Wanted Man is currently in theaters approaching $16 million at the box office. It’s about to surpass the lifetime gross of The Master (the best film he’s ever been in) while towering over the $1.5 million made by Hoffman’s A Late Quartet (the last film released while he was alive). Robin Williams, for his part, left behind a few finished performances, all of which stand to do better than the $300,000 made by his last project, The Face of Love.

There’s even an expectation that Fast & Furious 7 will rock the box office whenever it gets completed. After Paul Walker’s fatal car accident before shooting on the film had wrapped, Universal opted not to rewrite but instead hire his brothers to fill in his incomplete performance, using expensive tech to digitally replace faces. That endeavor is estimated to cost the studio an extra $50 million, but the massive investment will likely pay off, all things considered.

Mourning a celebrity is hard to calculate in financial terms and perhaps the numbers are beside the point. There’s a very human reason why posthumous films are so popular. We flock to a fitting farewell. Our awareness that the star is no longer with us makes their final performance immense — so immense that we want to give them an Oscar for it.